Truckloads of Data

Alex Woodie at Datanami has a good write-up of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) conference in Las Vegas last week. As AWS extends its offerings for IoT developers they have run up against the problem of migrating large amounts of data from customers to the AWS cloud. Their Snowball Edge can handle up to 100 TB of data in a suitcase-sized device but what about migrating exabytes of data? Enter the AWS Snowmobile, a shipping container on a truck, which will drive to a customer’s premises, load up with data and then drive it to the AWS data center for transfer.

According to Woodie:

Despite the huge computing advances made over the past decade, moving large amounts of data still poses a thorny logistical problem. As Jassy pointed out, if a company attempted to use a modest 10Gbps link to upload an exabyte of data, it would take 26 years. However, the same amount of data could be moved in just six months using a series of 10 Snowmobile deliveries.